Chapter 21. Working with the System Registry
Anyone running ColdFusion on the Windows
platform has probably encountered the system registry at one point or
another. The registry is a database of sorts that contains
configuration information on virtually every user, and piece of
hardware and software (including ColdFusion) on your system. The
registry is organized in a hierarchical fashion like that of a tree.
ColdFusion provides you with a tag for working with the system
registry, the CFREGISTRY tag, which is capable of
querying information from the registry, as well as setting new values
and deleting unwanted ones.
Before we get into the specifics of manipulating registry data, let’s look at how the registry is organized. There are two basic units that make up the registry, keys and values. A key is a logical container similar to a filesystem’s directory. Like a directory that contains files and additional subdirectories, keys can contain values and/or subkeys. A registry key and the subkeys and values below it are referred to as a branch. If we were to write out the structure of a typical registry branch, it might look something like this:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Allaire\ColdFusion\CurrentVersion\Mail
This branch stores values used by ColdFusion to interface with mail servers. As you can see, the key/subkey relationship looks exactly like a directory structure might (in DOS anyway).
Values (like files) are actually a representation for name/value pairs. Values are also known ...
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